Sales Advocate Newsletter

Build a Market-Driven Sales Campaign - Even When You're Inventing the Market

March 2001

by Andrea Conway and Sally Duby

Thanks to the Internet and sophisticated call center technologies, today's marketing is much more targeted than ever before. Where once we simply pushed products out to loosely defined market segments, we're now able to conduct personalized lead-development and telesales campaigns to "markets-of-one." These focused revenue-generating campaigns have proved to be very successful. Prerequisite, however, is that age-old marketing mandate: you must know your customer.

But what if you don't? What if your company is just starting out? Perhaps yours is a new technology that's not well understood. Or your customer base is limited to a couple of beta site prospects. It's a common plight for technology start-ups, a status that's made more challenging these days by tightened competition for venture funds. Today's technology start-ups must prove their ability to generate revenues quickly in order to earn future rounds of financing.

That's why smart start-ups should consider implementing revenue-generating sales campaigns earlier than is dictated by traditional market lifecycle models. The seven-step roadmap below will help you to design a market-driven sales campaign and maximize sales results in new markets. Apply these techniques when your product is in or nearing beta. They will help to shorten your time-to-revenue and lay the foundation for sound customer relationship practices.

Gather Customer Information. You can gather customer data before even landing your first paying customer. How? Talking to beta customers and trade show prospects are typical ways. But beyond that put your imagination to work. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write down everything you "know" about your customer, his or her needs, and how your product solves those needs.
Develop Customer Profiles. Review your customer information and organize your ideas into profiles. You might find that your customer is specific to certain market segments. Or you might uncover disparate customer types, such as commercial application developers and enterprise IT organizations.
Estimate Time to Revenue. Rank customer profiles according to profit potential and risk for each type of customer. It's fine to use educated guesswork; what you are doing is defining a logical starting point.
Target a Pilot Sales Campaign. Review your rankings to identify the best market in which to launch your first lead-development or telesales campaign. Don't be afraid to call in help. Outside marketing expertise can help you focus your initial target market and prepare your staff for prospecting and selling.
Call In Your Lead-Development and Telesales Teams. Let your sales experts advise you on how best to reach prospects in your initial target markets. What are your goals for where you are in product development? Are you trying to identify a pool of qualified best testers who can help you refine your product? Or are you ready to sell? Is it time to purchase lists of prospects that lead development can qualify into leads?
Conduct Your Pilot. In untested markets, it's safest to start with a small, targeted campaign. Work with your marketing and lead-development or telesales resources to identify the parameters. Set up milestones that enable you to receive frequent feedback. That way, you can easily make adjustments, manage your budget, overcome unexpected barriers, and maximize results.
Refine and Re-test. Feed the results of your pilot into the next phase of your marketing and sales efforts. With each campaign, you not only bring in revenue, you also build a foundation of real-world customer intelligence that will serve your company as it grows. Eventually, this growing, tested customer knowledge base will enable your company to make full use of the robust marketing and sales technologies employed by today's most successful high-tech firms.

About the authors:

Andrea Conway, president of Conway Marketing Associates, specializes in marketing business-to-business technology products. Her company, founded in 1992, serves start-up companies as well as such market leaders as Hewlett-Packard and Ariba.

Sally Duby is President and COO of Phone Works, the leading sales consulting firm to Silicon Valley companies. Phone Works specializes in helping companies build predictable revenue streams.

You can reach Phone Works at 510.749.9073.